Bangladesh

With gender equality being important for reduction of poverty and hunger, Bangladeshi women are playing a critical role in World Food Programme's work to break the cycle of hunger and create food secure communities. "WFP Bangladesh commemorates International Women's Day by renewed efforts to prioritise women in all our operations, and by underlining the value of involving men in the struggle to eradicate gender gaps and achieve lasting equality," said Christa Rader, WFP Bangladesh Representative.

Large groups of farmers in Bangladesh are switching from rice cultivation to tobacco farming, creating concerns about possible food shortages, according to the government and anti-tobacco lobbyists. (..) Bangladesh is losing 1 percent of arable land every year, in part due to erratic rains and land degradation, according to the UN World Food Programme.

The much-heralded School Feeding Programme was launched for urban working children on Tuesday, aiming to improve attendance levels and retention rates at learning centers, reports UNB. (..) Gradually, the feeding programme will provide micronutrient-fortified biscuits to the learners in Dhaka, Chittagong, Rajshahi, Khulna, Sylhet and Barishal. It will be implemented under a joint cooperation agreement between the Bureau of Non-Formal Education (BNFE) of the Ministry of Primary and Mass Education, the World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef Bangladesh.

United Nations food agencies say that people living in 22 countries suffer chronic hunger or difficulty finding enough to eat as a result of what they called protracted food crises. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Program (WFP) said in their new report that wars, natural disasters and poor government institutions have contributed to a continuous state of undernourishment in 22 nations. Most of these are in Africa like Somalia and Sudan but they also include Afghanistan, Haiti and Iraq.

Two little girls playing in the mud in a Dhaka shanty town are unaware of the Millennium Development Goals that were launched before they were born in order to help millions of children like them. (..) "The kids that you see here are suffering from two types of malnutrition," says John Aylieff, the country director for the United Nations World Food Programme (UNWFP). "They are underweight for their age, like eight million other children in Bangladesh." Many are also suffering from a chronic lack of vitamins and minerals. "That has a marked effect on the development of their bodies and their brains," he says, "particularly when those children are under age two."

Sixteen professional Bangladeshi photographers have won the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) Photography Awards 2010. (..) The WFP photography Awards is an annual award for excellence in food secularity-related photography in Bangladesh. The objective of the award is to raise national awareness and understanding of the ever-crucial issue that is food insecurity and its impact on the most vulnerable sectors of society, especially poor women and children. Announcing the awards, John Aylieff, WFP Representative, said, “Photography has a great role to play in the process of social change; photographers through their strong images can help the society in putting social issues like food security, child malnutrition and hunger higher up in the policy agenda.”

United Nation's (UN) bodies--WFP, UNDP and Unicef--have extended support to 14,000 families, affected by cyclone Aila, still living on embankments in Bangladesh. Drawing assistance from the UK's Department for International Development (DFID), the UN agencies will work to distribute food, assist with shelter and implement basic water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and nutrition interventions, said a press release.

United Nations agencies are providing relief to about 14,000 Bangladeshi families who are still living on embankments and in need of assistance, 15 months after they lost their homes when Cyclone Aila struck the impoverished South Asian country. The World Food Programme (WFP), the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) will provide about $4.6 million of aid under the initiative, which follows a request from the Government to support its own relief programmes, the UN Country Team in Bangladesh reported today.

Rising unemployment and food prices and a sluggish economy are taking their toll on Bangladesh, where a growing number of people are struggling to survive. (..) “In recent years, devastating cyclones and floods, the dramatic increase in food prices in 2008 and the global recession have all impacted economic growth in Bangladesh, which in turn has led to a deterioration of food security and the nutritional situation in the country,” Emamul Haque, spokesperson for the World Food Programme (WFP) in Bangladesh, told IRIN.

A total of 1.35 lakh female headed ultra poor households in eight most disaster prone northern districts are being given food security equipping them with livelihood skill development training and cash for implement income generating projects. The initiative has been taken under a project styled 'Food Security for Ultra Poor (FSUP), jointly implementing by four International development agencies - World Food Programme (WFP) (..).